Chill Unwanted Fat This Winter with CoolSculpting®

Although cool and Dallas don’t often go together when it comes to the temperatures, winter is a good time to give your unwanted fat the cold shoulder. CoolSculpting, that is. CoolSculpting is the revolutionary, non-invasive way to eliminate from 20-23 percent of the fat in treatment areas without an incision, suture, or downtime of any kind. At Dr. Amirlak’s, we perform many CoolSculpting treatments for our patients and we’ve frozen many, many pounds of fat. But some people still either haven’t heard of CoolSculpting or they’re kind of cloudy about just what it is. So, here’s some background on the science behind the procedure and how CoolSculpting came to be.

It all started with a few popsicles

CoolSculpting® wasn’t the original intention when two scientists studied the effects of freezing on the cheek area. Two doctors at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Drs. Dieter Manstein and R. Rox Anderson, were doing a study that theorized children who ate lots of popsicles growing up developed dimples in their cheeks more than children who didn’t eat lots of popsicles. Dimples form in the cheeks where the muscle isn’t covered with much fat, so when the muscle contracts a dimple forms. The idea was that the cold in the popsicles somehow affected the fat cells in the cheeks. The doctors called this Popsicle Panniculitis.

Based on what they thought could be happening in the cheeks, the two doctors made the next step and theorized that the same process/result could happen elsewhere. So, they investigated selectively freezing fat cells in a process they called cryolipolysis. The end result of those studies was CoolSculpting®.

How it works

To achieve cryolipolysis, CoolSculpting® involves a three-step process. First, a cooling panel uses suction to pull the target area skin into solid contact with the cooling plates. Then the cooling is directed downward into the skin. The temperature is precisely equal to the freezing point of fat cells, while not freezing adjacent tissue cells that freeze at a lower temperature. Exposure to this freezing causes fat cell apoptosis (a natural, controlled cell death). The body sends cytokines and other inflammatory mediators to the area to gradually digest the dead fat cells in the weeks following the CoolSculpting session. Lipids from the dead fat cells are slowly released and transported by the lymphatic system to be processed and eliminated from the body, in the same manner that fat in food is eliminated. It takes anywhere from three to 12 weeks for the body to permanently remove the dead fat cells.

The result? A 20 to 23% decrease in fat cells in the treatment area over the months following your CoolSculpting session with the team at Amirlak Plastic Surgery.

Non-invasive and not painful

The entire CoolSculpting® is not painful. There is some minor discomfort when the cooling is first being delivered, but that passes as the area becomes numb with the cooling. And there isn’t any downtime. How cool, literally, is that?!

CoolSculpting has been approved by the FDA for eight areas: the abdomen, thighs, bra line fat, back fat, upper arms, flanks, underneath the buttocks, and the jowls. Do any of those areas need to chill out on your body? Call us at Amirlak Plastic Surgery, (214) 974-4948 to schedule an appointment.